The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

lively public festival of peace. Europe didn’t want a war in Yugoslavia.
More than that, however, it didn’t want all the refugees.
Yugoslavia, a mistake?
Yugoslavia came into being in the context of great political changes in
Europe during the First and Second World Wars. The great powers were
involved in the emergence, the maintenance, the life and the death of
Yugoslavia. In the First World War, Great Britain, France, the USA and
Italy supported its foundation to strengthen the barrier against Germany’s
“drive to the east”, and against Bolshevik Russia. The Axis
powers – Germany and Italy – destroyed it in 1941. The victorious
powers of the Second World War, Great Britain, USA and the USSR,
supported the revival of Yugoslavia, because it had been successful in
its fight against Hitler. Just as the victorious powers of the First World
War had seen Yugoslavia as a guarantor for the political balance in
Europe, those of the Second World War had similar expectations of the
second Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was a conglomeration of several nations, languages, cultures
and religions. It has been heir to four different cultural/civilizational realms:
the Byzantine, the Mediterranean, the Central European and the
Islamic. Foreign rulers have left deep traces on the cultural identity of
the population. Nevertheless, the differences in development were
greater than between the poorest and richest parts of Europe. In Yugoslavia,
all the problems of modern civilization clashed. The peoples had
lived in one state only since 1918, in which there were eight years of
restricted parliamentary democracy, six years of royal dictatorship, and
six years of pseudo-parliamentarianism. During the Second World War,
the country also experienced a brutal civil war alongside the struggle for
liberation. During the forty-six years thereafter, Yugoslavia was Stalinist
for seven years and then grew from a centralist state to the most open
socialist state that ever existed. Thus, Yugoslavia experienced capitalism
and communism, fascism, occupation and civil war.
Yugoslavia was an artificial and at the same time a natural area, depend -
ing on how one looks at it, just as other countries are. At its foundation
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